Monday, May 09, 2005

Voice of the White House?

Scroll down and you'll find a link to one of those mysterious "Voice of the White House" essays, brought to you by the folks at the equally-mysterious TBRNews. The Voice claims to be an anonymous insider, although most feel that this assertion is a charade. If you check out the comments section, you'll see that one of our sharper readers has identified this site as somehow connected to "Betty Bowers."

For those of you who don't know, Betty Bowers is a satirical site devoted to "America's best Christian." And the Bowers folks are, in fact, doing a rather funny Gannon routine right now -- just as the Voice is tying Gannon to the most notorious lobbyist in DC history..

But is the BB brigade really the secret power behind TBRNews? Our reader says that a Betty Bowers URL briefly came up while he navigating his way through the TBRNews site.

Hmmm...well, maybe. Nothing of that sort has happened to me. And more to the point, nothing about either that site or the Voice of the White House columns screams "satire" to me. Now, I'm not saying that the Voice necessarily offers trustworthy information. But his stuff just isn't funny. And it doesn't try to be funny.

Other sources, I should note, link TBRNews to the Liberty Lobby. I've seen no proof of that proposition, either, although it sort of makes sense, given the gratuitous anti-Israel swipes that occasionally pop up. I doubt that an opponent of Israel would have an insider position within this White House.

Why go into this matter? Because the latest "Voice" allegations about Gannon are fascinating, however unverified -- in a way, I want them to be true, although I doubt that they are. The Voice may well be a fake. Yet fakes are interesting in and of themselves, which is why you'll find bios of Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard on my shelves.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In your post, you mention that you have no proof that TBRNews is connected to Liberty Lobby.

Let me try to explain the connection, though the details elude me. This may also be of interest to you because I think it explains why TBRNews may have slandered Todd Blodgett, by trying to connect him to Gannongate and an alleged gay honeypot sex extortion scheme.

To understand the connection, you have to recognize that the TBR in TBRNews stood for "The Barnes Review." TBRNews admits as much, on its "about us" page, here:

http://tbrnews.org/aboutus.htm

The Barnes Review is an anti-semitic website dedicated to holocaust denial. It was named after an historian-conspiracy theorist-holocaust denier named Harry Elmer Barnes. The Barnes Review was founded by Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby. Here is an explanation on SourceWatch:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Barnes_Review

But supposedly, TBRNews no longer is connected to the Barnes Review. The TBRNews site claims that it no longer has any connection to the Barnes Review, and is under the "new management" of one Walter Storch.

When Carto was in legal and financial trouble and feared that his Liberty Lobby and neo-nazi record labels would be seized in bankruptcy, he sold those businesses to Todd Blodgett in 1996. Carto and Blodgett had a falling out apprently. I think it had something to do with Blodgett not wanting to give them back, which was supposed to be the understanding behind this transaction. As a result, Carto seems to have planted a lot of anti-Blodgett documents on the web. If TBRNews is still connected to Barnes Review, this would explain why they would focus on this seemingly irrelevant DC bottom feeder to link to our worst collective fears about the meaning of Gannongate.

The reason I looked into this is that I wrote a long post on DU based in part on TBRNews, your blog, and Lexis searches that linked Blodgett, Aziz al-Taee and Gannon, as I mentioned in comments to an earlier post on your blog, that was cited around a number of progressive blogs.

In retrospect, I feel that I was tricked into implicating Blodgett by TBRNews's very strange but effective way of suggesting connections without actually stating them directly. Blodgett may be a perfectly "innocent sleazebag" -- that is he is certainly a bad guy by his own confession when it comes to neo-Nazi record labels, but I increasingly doubt he has anything to do with Gannongate.

Again, I would love to hear whether you have had any further contact with Blodgett.

HamdenRice of DU

Anonymous said...

Walter Storch is a close associate of(or more likely a pseudonym for)Gregory Douglas (not his real name either)who wrote a book "Regicide" containing documents believed by most serious researchers to be fabrications. He also wrote a series of books about Nazi General Heinrich Mueller containing documents believed by WW2 experts to be fabrications. He seems to traffic in disinformation but if so who does he work for?

Gary Buell

Anonymous said...

I think the Voice is fake, he's sounding too much like he's full of himself. He gives you nothing verifiable. Nothing you can proove. He's just a fake....too bad. Huh?